Video: Meat meets art in Cambridge gallery

Thursday

The title of the art show at the Pierre Menard Gallery raises a lot of questions, and even fewer answers, which may be a good thing for the artists of the “Meat After Meat Joy” exhibition.

The title of the art show at the Pierre Menard Gallery raises a lot of questions, and even fewer answers, which may be a good thing for the artists of the “Meat After Meat Joy” exhibition.

The 10 artists whose works decorate the exhibit, which opened Saturday, used animal meat as a medium in some form or another.

Some artists used meat as an actual tool to create their art — Zuang Huan filmed himself walking around New York City in a body suit made of meat — while others, like David Raymond, used meat as their subject matter.

“[Meat] struck me as having visual properties I had not explored,” said Raymond, whose paintings are featured in the show. “I was more interested in treating it like a post-life subject and began to use butcher cuts of meats — rib roast, pork chops, steaks — which struck me as something as a commoditization as a designed object meant for sale, meant to at first, attract someone for sale. I found that an interesting angle worth investigating.”

Raymond began working with meat intensely in 1990 when he noticed a piece of chuck steak.

“Up close, it looked like a piece of geography,” Raymond said. “If you think about the nature of organic things, they share properties, it’s that organic-ness, that soft-growth pattern of things. Now, they’re altered by someone making a cut or shape, like a road cutting through the earth.”

Visitors to the gallery can examine a flag made of pure raw meat and meat fat.

The flag’s sculptor, Betty Hirst, also produced an opened book made of frozen raw meat and, possibly disturbing, a baby girl on a pink blanket composed of dried meat.

The show’s curator and fellow meat artist, Heide Hatry, grew up on a pig farm and said for her, meat is a “primordial fact of life, even if it is a highly problematic one.”

Hatry said the show, entitled, “Meat After Meat Joy,” hails from a performance by Carolee Schneeman in the 1960s.

The show consisted of “scantily” dressed people “writhing and interacting” among dead animals and animal parts — the show, in some part seemed to be a celebration of life as the tone was joyous even though life ultimately results in death. The show also acted as a statement that people “embrace the forces of destruction.”

While Raymond’s exploration into the visual aspects of meat is not meant to be a political statement on the treatment of animals — Raymond does eat meat, although he finds the treatment of animals for slaughter disturbing — for some, the work displayed in “Meat After Meat Joy” will definitely raise those questions.

“We hope that this exhibit causes people to stop and think about the experience inflicted on millions of chickens, lambs, pigs, cows and other animals every day — and consider stopping this cycle of violence by trying a humane vegetarian diet,” said David Perle, spokesman for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization.

Nathan Censullo, who works at the gallery, insisted the works were not meant to be statements on the audience’s dietary habits.

“I don’t necessarily think this has anything to do with making a commentary on people’s diets,” Censullo said. “It’s a bunch of people looking at the same material and finding value for what they want to do. That’s sort of the interesting thing — it’s a bizarre, weird activity. There’s not a whole lot of people that are doing this. Not that this hasn’t been done before, but that doesn’t matter, it’s what we’re doing now.”

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